At the turn of the C20th the famous artist Mikhail Vrubel lived in an apartment at No. 3 Lubyansky Proezd street – in fact we can now see only the building's facade. This building blocks in a further building, in which is housed the Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum.To get into the Museum, you have to go around the corner of the building with Vrubel's old apartment, and walk a block up Myanitskaya Street until you come to the Biblio-Globus Bookshop. You should see a bronze bust about a further 20m along. If you now turn into the courtyard by the bronze bust, you'll find the entrance to the Mayakovsky Museum.

The whole approach in the Mayakovsky Museum is radically different to most museums – you won't find any glass cases filled with displays of dusty exhibits. Instead there are plastic areas like theatrical scenery. The whole display area is a free-flowing space, without bare walls or dividing floor-levels. The central exhibit is the memorial stairway – it goes right up to the fourth floor of a space that was formerly a soviet communal apartment with small room at the top. It was there from Spring 1919 that the famous poet Mayakovsky lived and worked. There too, in that same room, on 14th April 1930, Mayakovsky blew his brains out with a Mauser pistol he called his “Comrade”. The circumstances of his suicide remain controversial, even today.

How to describe Mayakovsky? A soviet poet, a playwright, screenwriter, movie director, screen actor, artist, magazine editor, a Cossack, the owner of the first licensed private car in Russia – a bully, a playboy, a wild spender, a citizen. Vladimir Mayakovsky was all of these and more. The museum serves as a portrait of this poet, avant-gardist, revolutionary reinventor of the written word, of verse, of meanings, and transformer of whole literary and artistic genres. The museum is laid-out with the careful attention to design of a film-director – the displays, exhibits and architectural set-up all reflect the unique creativity and originality of Mayakovsky's life, work, and artistic output.

The Mayakovsky Museum doesn't have the usual kind of exhibits visitors expect. There are film screenings, lecture series, and they stage performances. It's been like that since it opened in 1989. It can safely be called the first experimental museum in Moscow. The guiding hand behind the museum was Evgeny Amaspiur, Moscow's acknowledged expert of hyper-realism. Amaspiur graduated from the Stroganov Academy as a design specialist, and went on to design a large number of different exhibitions, both abroad and in Russia – including displays at the VDNkh Exhibition Centre. Evgeny Amaspiur is involved in theatre direction and philosophy. He was the author of the entire conception, architecture, and displays of the Mayakovsky Museum.

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Информация по экскурсии "Walking tour around Kitay-Gorod"

Kitay-gorod is one of the oldest parts of Moscow. It appeared nearby the old wooden Kremlin. Although the name translates as “Chinatown,” it probably derives from kita (wattle), referring to the wall that surrounded this early Kremlin suburb. Today, remains of an old city wall and colorful churches are scattered throughout this ancient neighborhood.

The stone walls were erected in the 16th century by an Italian architect known under the name Petrok Maly and originally featured 13 towers and six gates. They were as thick as they were high. The last of the towers were demolished in the 1930s, but small portions of the wall still stand. One of two remaining parts of the wall is located in Zaryadye and the other near the exit from the Okhotny Ryad station of Moscow Metro behind the Hotel Metropol.

Kitay-gorod starts at Red Square. Apart from Red Square, the quarter is bordered by the chain of Central Squares of Moscow, notably Theatre Square (in front of Bolshoi Theatre), Lubyanka Square (in front of the KGB headquarters), and Slavyanskaya Square.

Since time immemorial Kitay-gorod has been developing as a trading area. And for centuries it was known as the most prestigious business area of Moscow. Its three main streets — Varvarka, Ilyinka, and Nikolskaya — are lined with banks, shops, and storehouses. There are also lots of historical buildings that relate to the heritage of the federal and global importance now.

In our tour you will walk along Nikolskaya Street that is famous for being the site of Moscow's first university, the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, housed in extant Zaikonospassky monastery (1660s). Another monastery cathedral, the main church of Epiphany Bogoyavlensky Monastery (1690s), is the oldest male monastery in Moscow, stands in the middle of Kitay-gorod in the eponymous Bogoyavlensky Lane. The 18th century survives in the exterior walls of the otherwise rebuilt Gostiny Dvor (Guest Merchant's Court) by Giacomo Quarenghi.

A whole quarter of Kitay-gorod adjacent to the Moskva River and known as Zaryadye (now just Varvarka Street) was demolished in the 20th century, sparing only those structures that were classified as historic monuments. These include the Cathedral of the Sign (1679–84), the Church of All Saints (1680s), St. George's Church on Pskov Hill (1657), St. Maksim's Church (1698), St. Anna's Church at the Corner (1510s), St. Barbara's Church (1796–1804), the Old English Embassy (1550s), and the 16th century Romanov boyar residence. The two last are the museums. You can visit them to see the life of the first Romanovs in the 16-17th centuries.